Saturday, 1 January 2011

Breaking More Waves 2011

Happy New Year. Welcome back to Breaking More Waves 2011 after our short break, or if this is your first visit, hello it’s lovely to meet you. This is the first of two posts today, the other which will appear in a short while concerns the annual UK Blogger Album of the Year poll run by the excellent Sweeping The Nation blog.

New Year is a time for resolutions to be made and changes to be implemented. This includes Breaking More Waves.

2011 will see a number of minor alterations to the blog. This is the all singing all dancing, version 2.0 - slightly leaner and meaner. Yes, just like governments that are hit by recession we're making cuts. Here's our budget announcement.

Reviews of gigs and concerts are to be no more. These are the posts that get the fewest number of hits / readers and although we’ve never wanted or attempted to be a big hit blog, it seems a little pointless spending the limited free time we have writing things when only a handful of people are going to read them. Instead we'll tweet about them so follow us on Twitter.

Next, we’re also stopping album reviews. You may have noticed that we’ve phased these out in the last few months anyway. This is for similar reasons to the live gigs and concerts – although they get more hits, reviewing an album takes significantly more time and usually by the time we publish there’s already hundreds of reviews out there, so the exercise seems a little pointless. Unless we can offer some further fresh new territory or opinion on an album as part of a more discursive piece we won't be reviewing.

So what will we be covering and in what form?

Primarily we will remain a new music blog, but the emphasis will be on individual songs. However where we find a band that we love, we will post as many times as we think necessary, irrespective of if anyone else loves them or not. Where a very new band is featured we will continue the ‘New Waves @ Breaking More Waves’ feature, but the blogs are to be re- titled just ‘New Waves’.

Our summer coverage of UK festivals will continue, as these are some of the highlights of our year, but the coverage will be in a more condensed, readable form, rather than our previous long rambling reviews. More of that from May.

Our occasional discursive articles on the wider issues surrounding music will continue as lots of people have given feedback saying that they enjoy these the most and they are a little different from other blogs. We hope that some of these particular blogs will bring something fresh to the musical conversation.

And finally, as we announced in November of last year we will be introducing a new blog feature published every Monday entitled Music That Made Me. These blogs will be our reaction against what we see as a continued progression to a more throwaway culture, with people’s attention spans decreasing. They will be a very personal and autobiographical trawl through the songs that we have established long term relationships with and wouldn’t dare to throw away. It will be a weekly nostalgia trip and will give context to our tastes and influences.

In essence Breaking More Waves 2011 will be more focussed on its editorial policy. It’s more of an evolution than a revolution. The style of writing and length of article will remain the same - we realise that our posts are significantly longer than many new music blogs, but we've always wanted to appeal to those who want to engage a little more than just downloading the latest buzz track. We want to talk as well as listen. Feel free to join the conversation.

2011 holds the promise of being a mightily spectacular year for music. Let’s hope it delivers. Ready ? For starters here's three bands that could have possibly made our Ones to Watch 2011 list that we published last December if it wasn't for the fact that they were outside of the UK. Enjoy tracks by U.S band Cults, Norway's Mr Little Jeans and a remix from The Naked and Famous from New Zealand. For the rest of this week, to kick off the New Year, with the exception of Music That Made Me we'll be publishing a whole host of other new bands who didn't quite make our Ones To Watch 2011 list, but were given consideration for it and are all very good. Expect some cowbelltastic trance rock, some lo-fi C86 referencing south coast surf indie, some wonderful one man orchestral pop and more. 2011 still Breaking More Waves.